Five bedridden years with bone tuberculosis shaped the novelist Alberto Moravia
At nine, Alberto Pincherle caught tuberculosis of the bone and spent five years in bed, reading Dostoevsky, Joyce and Shakespeare. He later named that illness and Fascism as the two forces that most shaped him. Writing as Alberto Moravia, he produced novels that Godard, Bertolucci and De Sica turned into films.
Born in Rome on 28 November 1907 to a wealthy family, he took his pen name from Moravia, one of the historic Czech lands, a link to his paternal grandmother. His father Carlo, a Jewish Venetian, was an architect and painter; his Catholic mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, came from Ancona and had Dalmatian roots. The family straddled Italy's political divide. Paternal cousins Carlo and Nello Rosselli founded the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà and were murdered in France on Mussolini's orders in 1937, while his maternal uncle Augusto De Marsanich served as an undersecretary in the Fascist cabinet.
Illness ended his formal schooling: three years at home, then two in a sanatorium near Cortina d'Ampezzo, during which he taught himself French and German and wrote poetry. Leaving in 1925 at 18, he began his first novel, Gli indifferenti, a clinical study of a bourgeois mother and two of her children sliding into moral decay. He paid 5,000 lira to publish it himself in 1929, and critics greeted it as a notable piece of new Italian fiction.
The regime made his life difficult. It barred reviews of one novel in 1935, then seized La mascherata and banned Agostino in 1941, pushing him toward surreal, allegorical writing and a pseudonym. In 1941 he also wed Elsa Morante, a fellow novelist he had met five years earlier. After the armistice of September 1943 the couple sheltered in Fondi, an episode he later reworked into La ciociara, which Vittorio De Sica filmed as Two Women.
Returning to Rome in May 1944, he wrote for Il Corriere della Sera until his death and grew steadily more famous, winning the Premio Strega in 1952 and founding the magazine Nuovi Argomenti in 1953. His precise, detached prose, preoccupied with bourgeois malaise, attracted directors: Bernardo Bertolucci made The Conformist in 1970, and Jean-Luc Godard turned Il disprezzo into Contempt. An atheist, he presided over PEN International from 1959 to 1962 and died on 26 September 1990.
Source: Alberto Moravia
